robic

API Development

Robic Architecture

Robic’s API is divided into three layers:

• The controller layer for receiving and responding to incoming requests
• The service layer comprised predominantly of Mediator queries and commands
• The repository layer which functions as a data access layer to the MySQL database

Developing with Robic API

Developing using environment variables

Robic uses a number of environment variables to prevent sensitive environment variables being exposed to a public codebase such as this. To setup your local environment for development, you will need to set the following environment variables:

• TokenKey - secret token used for password hashing
• MySQLConnectionString - MySQL database connection string

This can be prefixed prior to calling dotnet watch run. i.e.

TokenKey="123abc" \
MySQLConnectionString="123abc" \
dotnet run

For simplicity’s sake, we keep this in startup.sh (omitted from Git)

Developing with Docker

# from api directory
cd /api

# build Docker image
docker build -t ryanachten/robic -f .\Dockerfile .

# run Docker container available on http://localhost:5000/
docker run -it --rm -e TokenKey=$env:TokenKey -e MySQLConnectionString=$env:MySQLConnectionString -p 5000:80 ryanachten/robic

# push changes to Docker Hub if things are looking good (requires Docker Hub login)
docker login
docker push ryanachten/robic

Developing locally with React Native

Android

To run with Android, we need to reference local ports using http://10.0.2.2:PORT - see here for more information.

iOS

To run with iOS simulator, we need to run the server in HTTPS. However, iOS does not seem to work with localhost domains when running .NET Core locally. To work around this, we route the local server using ngrok.

Steps:

• Run .NET Core while watching for changes: dotnet watch run
• Point ngrok at localhost: ngrok http https://localhost:5001
• Use forwarding address printed by ngrok as API URL for React Native local development